Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl.

Sometimes one abandons a book, and then later tries again. Often, the book fares no better the second time, but in this case I’m glad I gave Special Topics another go.

It’s a well written, engaging and quirky book about a 17 year old Blue Van Meer, a high-IQer who lives (or rather, travels) with her eccentric, brilliant and charming dad, an itinerant college professor.

In the introduction, Blue quotes her dad regarding speaking as a professor: “And remember. Always have everything you say exquisitely annotated, and, wherever possible, provide staggering Visual Aids, because, trust me, there will always be some clown sitting in the back– somewhere by the radiator– who will raise his fat, flipperlike hand and complain, ‘No, no, you’ve got it all wrong.'”

And so with that premise, every other sentence in this book is relentlessly, gratuitously annotated, and some hand-drawn Visual Aids are also presented. Really, the annotations are somewhat breathtaking in their extent, and often tangential and amusing. One imagines it doubled or tripled the length of time it took to write the novel. Of course, some of the references are invented, but still.

This book is essentially a mystery, and I’m reminded of a Northern Exposure episode where they discuss the “idealized teenage girl world” nature of Nancy Drew: Single, independent, highly intelligent girl lives only with her father (none of the teenage typical mother-daughter clashing) and solves mysteries. This book sort of takes that idealization and turns it on its head, like a grittier reimagining of Nancy.

I looked up Marisha Pessl to see what else she’s written, and discovered that she attended my alma-mater for two years before transferring to a school in New York. She studied Radio/TV/Film, which I “minored” in, albeit 5 or 6 years after I did. She said the father character was based on an amalgam of two of her film professors there, though I can’t figure out who. Perhaps they were new.

A movie is reportedly in the works.

She has another book coming in 2010, also a mystery. Given the somewhat gimmicky nature of the book, I’ll be interested to see if she can pull off another intriguing story.

Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin

Published in 1983, this is a fantasy/alternate history novel taking place around two turns of centuries, 1900s and 2000s. It’s got master burglers, flying horses, a mystical small town, and New York City.

There’s a theme that I can’t get behind (that reason needs the mystical to be in balance) but otherwise it’s a poetically written book that I enjoyed more for the parts than the whole. There’s a comical sequence about a hobo who does absolutely everything wrong that I quite enjoyed, a dialog in mechanical technobabble that was artfully written and the individual character’s stories were engaging overall.

It’s a good read that I have jaysaint to thank for, many years after the fact.

Sloppy Firsts: A Novel by Megan McCafferty

Really, despite the claims of the jacket cover saying this book is meant for anyone 15-99, I had no business reading this, except perhaps for the purposes of getting inside the mind of a teenage girl. Because I’ll have one at some point. In about 10 years. By which point I will have forgotten everything about this book, if I haven’t already.

steakums‘ friend sent this and the second in the series (out of four so far), Second Helpings. This one chronicles the story of the year in the life of a smart girl growing up in a small, coastal New Jersey town. steakums‘ friend got this for her because the both were smart girls growing up in a small, coastal New Jersey town. They spent summers at the boardwalk (though steakums claims with pride that she was one of the few who didn’t work there), which is mentioned quite a bit in the book.

So that’s why steakums should read it. All I can say is I was looking for something that would in no way strain my brain, which this book certainly did not. I was looking for an antidote to the barrage of doom and gloom of the news of the world. There were certainly no large issues to grapple with in this tome.

So, mission accomplished. But, this combined with Cringe means that I’m all set for teenage angst for the rest of the year.

Or decade.

The Magicians and Mrs. Quent by Galen Beckett (pseudonym of Mark Anthony)

A purported first novel, but actually a first novel of a pseudonym, this book is written sort-of in the style of Jane Austen. Sort of. It’s like someone trying to write in the style of Jane Austen but without quite the same sensibility (for lack of a better word).

It felt like a first book, but I guess this guy’s got a whole series of novels under his belt under the name The Last Rune.

Essentially, it seems like someone tried to breed Jane Austen and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and got something, but that thing is not likely to be able to breed itself. I’m straining a metaphor here, I see that. But “breeding” in this scenario would be a second book, which this author very much seems to want to write, leaving many unanswered (though not particularly interesting) questions hanging.

Regardless of whether it breeds or not, I shan’t be there to witness it. While this book isn’t terrible and kept me sufficiently interested throughout, there’s likely to be grander skies out there.

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
-Charles McKay, Preface, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)

“Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong, and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific. It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically.”
-Bertrand Russell, 1959

There’s an interesting perspective put forth here, covering Reaganomics/Thatcherism, post-modernism, cults, quakery, etc., etc., essentially referring to it all as “Mumbo-Jumbo”. There’s a deluge of history related, presumably diffracted through the author’s lens.

The topics range so widely and in almost a stream-of-consciousness manner such that I can’t really give a general opinion. Some of this book rang true, some didn’t, some gave me stuff to think about.

I read with most interest the Reaganomics/Thatcherism part, largely because we are poised to try and solve this Second Great Depression issue, and there are some loud voices endorsing some trickle-down methods of stimulus (which the author puts in the Mumbo-Jumbo category). I’m becoming motivated to read more about the economic theory of Keynes and Friedman, which is not a sentence I ever thought I’d write.

Overall, I thought it was an interesting book, though not overwhelmingly clear in its presentation. It felt more like a description of a bunch of wacky stuff that happened, rather than an organized argument. Which is odd, since this is a book about a supposed decline of rational thought in modern times.

The U.S./Canada title of the book is Idiot Proof: A Short History of Modern Delusions, which calls to mind the 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions, a classic work that I’ve read about half of¹. This book is not quite as scholarly as that work, but informative nevertheless.

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¹ I got really bogged down in the chapters relating the Crusades in Volume II, and haven’t gotten back to it.

The Best American Essays 2005 edited by Susan Orlean (Series editor Robert Atwan)

I have, at home, almost a complete set of The Best American Essays, starting from 1986. I have only read about 20% of them.

Since the editor changes every year, the number of essays that I find interesting in each vary considerably.

I pulled 2005 of the shelf because I have read and enjoyed Susan Orlean’s essay collection The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup. Also, other authors in this one include David Sedaris, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Ian Frazier.

Sedaris has a witty and surprisingly touching essay about lancing a boil on his butt.

Kitty Burns Florey has a nostalgic essay about diagramming sentences.

Ian Frazier’s essay about memory or the lack thereof is a bit tiresome.

Ellen Ullman has a disappointing essay promisingly titled “Dining with Robots” that ends with the line “Robots aren’t becoming us, I feared; we are becoming them.” What. Ever.

David Foster Wallace delves into a lobster festival in the overly analyzing, wordily written, extensively annotated way that only he could. (RIP)

I enjoyed Jonathan Franzen’s essay The Comfort Zone about his obsession with Peanuts against the backdrop of the 60’s. I find I appreciate Peanuts more reading about it than actually reading it.

Cringe edited by Sarah Brown

So, in various parts of the country, they do this thing called Cringe. The brainchild of Sarah Brown, essentially people dig out their old diaries from childhood and read the most embarrassing parts in front of lots of people. This book is a compilation of some of those pieces.

It’s pretty funny. And it’s funny because it’s true. Maybe we didn’t keep diaries, but we all at least thought some of the things that go on up on that stage or in this book. Cringe is an apt name.

What’s also true is what Ms. Brown says in the afterword:

“If there’s one thing that this experience has taught me, it’s that I have zero patience for teenagers. When I was a teenager myself, I always thought I’d be one of those cool adults who Understood and Listened, but now I realize that my reaction to any current angst is Please, go form your personality somewhere far away from me.“

The book has fantastic art direction, with beautiful collages of teenage angst mementos.

What’s (unintentionally?) funny is that each piece has some commentary by the “grown-up” version of the person who wrote the original pieces. I expect that some of the commentary, when read after these authors leave their twenties, will be just as cringe-worthy as the original pieces.

It’s a good reality check for a parent of a future teen, and a current elementary school kid. Right now, even smaller matters have even greater significance than the teenage angst over relationships and school… it’s good to keep that in mind.

Also, it’s good to keep in mind that I’ll likely be reading excerpts from LiveJournal at Cringe 2014.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – Vols I & II – by Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill

Kicking off the 2009 book log, these graphic novels were a bit different than I expected.

I had expected a turn of the last century equivalent of a Justice League or X-men, meaning set in a universe that would later have those groups or their equivalent. But these stories exist in a universe that is wholly different, where virtually all fictional characters of our universe are real. In short, the concept is more literature-based than… whatever typical superhero comics are based on.

Which is not to say this is not a good premise. It’s very enjoyable, and most of that fun is in trying to catch the literary references (not unlike Jasper Fforde’s stuff). There is a gentleman, a professor in a college somewhere, who has extensively researched the tomes and identified all the references to literature and history, from subtle background objects to main characters. I read a little of his website and grew exhausted with the scope of his research, which must mirror the research of the original authors.

The almanac at the back of Vol. II is good reading, and packed with detail on this universe they’ve created. It’s essentially a travel guide, detailing where you can find the hole Alice fell down and other interesting attractions in post-Victorian England.

There is one more LoEG novel (The Black Dossier) and a new one due out this year (Vol. III: Century). I look forward to reading them.

I’m told to skip the movie adaptation.